Back on October 11th, Deia provided journalistic coverage of a pipeline protest in Walhalla, North Dakota. The protest involved an act of civil disobedience in which 5 people used shut-off valves to stop tar sands crude transported by TransCanada pipelines from entering the U.S. These five locations were private holdings of TransCanada and represented the main access points for corporate-produced tar sands. When the protesters operated the shut-off valves, TransCanada’s significant flow of greenhouse gas producing syncrude was temporarily halted.

(TransCanada is a corporate producer of tar sands — one of the most environmentally and climatologically destructive fuels on planet Earth. An energy source whose continued use risks extraordinarily damaging climate outcomes. Now that replacement fuels and renewable energy sources such as wind, solar, biofuels, and electric vehicles are much more readily available, we have an opportunity to turn away from such dangerous activities. For years now, climate activists have been fighting to make the public aware of risks and harms associated with tar sands extraction all while challenging an unhealthy level of economic dominance by fossil fuel interests that prevents and delays access to far less damaging energy sources. Image source: Desmogblog.)

Deia, according to her statements to Desmogblog, was recording the act of civil disobedience by one of the activists operating the shut-off valves — documenting what is likely to become an event of historic importance as a filmmaker and a climate journalist.

In general, I felt like this was an extremely important action to document because it was unprecedented — shutting down all of the oil sands coming into the U.S. from Canada. And as a climate reporter and someone who worries about the impacts of climate change and our future, I know that the Canadian oil sands are a pretty scary source of energy to be exploiting at this point.

To be very clear, Deia was both performing a public service by recording an event of historic significance and exercising journalistic freedoms that are held sacred by the Constitution of the United States. The Constitution plainly states:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Ironically, not only do these charges serve to infringe upon the protected freedoms of an American citizen, they also have no legal basis whatsoever. For, acting as an event-documenting journalist, Deia in no way served as an accessory to or conspirator for any crime. Furthermore, the charges leveled by North Dakota do not in any way fit events as they transpired or match the legal definitions of possible crimes as they are technically defined. No property or services were stolen as part of the protest action. Access to tar sands crude was simply briefly interrupted. And since TransCanada is a private corporation that profits from its sales of tar sands to agencies within the U.S., labeling its wealth-seeking activity as a ‘public service’ is the very definition of inaccurate legalistic contortion.

Moreover, Deia’s record of the pipeline shut-off by activists has been unjustly and probably unlawfully confiscated. An action that removes from the public eye a critical piece of reporting related to an event of historic human welfare significance.

In the context of Deia’s climate journalism, we should very clearly identify the climate harms and risks that arise from continuing to burn fossil fuels and in expanding that rate of burning. And we should also state plainly that it is these harms, these risks which provide strong justification on moral, survival, and human safety and welfare grounds for the actions made by protesters covered by Deia.

The science is pretty clear on the fact that of the five major mass extinction events that have occurred on planet Earth, at least four were set off or greatly contributed to by large environmental carbon releases and related rising global temperatures. This includes the worst mass extinction event — the Permian — in which hothouse temperatures may have produced a Canfield Ocean that, in turn, wiped out most of life on Earth.

Based on our best understanding, it takes an atmospheric equivalent CO2 level (CO2e) of around 550 to 1000 parts per million under current conditions to generate an appreciable risk of setting off a hothouse mass extinction event. This is particularly true if, as is the case today, such an initial carbon spike occurs following periods of glaciation when Earth’s available carbon stores for providing added warming feedbacks are at their highest levels. Meanwhile, the currently unprecedented rate at which human beings are adding carbon to the atmosphere through fossil fuel burning presents further risks outside the context of past hothouse events.

(Neil Degrasse Tyson — ‘I don’t want Earth to look like Venus.’)

We’ve already pushed CO2 levels, through our burning of fossil fuels and through other industrial activities, to above 400 parts per million (and to around 490 parts per million on the CO2 equivalent scale during 2016). The amount of carbon in the atmosphere already is currently enough to risk raising global temperatures this Century to 1.6 to 2.1 degrees Celsius above 188os values, to risk amplifying feedbacks in which the Earth System produces its own carbon spike that adds to the human sources, and to present serious challenges to the resiliency of human civilization and life on Earth.

But, even worse, there’s presently enough carbon listed as proven reserves on the books of coal, oil, and gas companies across the world to push atmospheric CO2 equivalent levels well above 900 parts per million. If we burn all this carbon, or if we discover and extract even more, we will see between 4 and 9 degrees Celsius warming this century and possibly as much as 9-18 C warming in the centuries to follow. So much burning and resulting heating of the Earth would set off a catastrophe that no current human civilization would be likely to survive. One that could also cause the worst mass extinction event in all of the deep, deep time of Earth’s long history.

These basic facts may be difficult for some to hear and understand — especially when they’ve staked their aspirations for economic growth on the false hope represented by fossil fuels. But, as tough as these facts are to listen to, they remain. Continuing to burn fossil fuels will wreck civilizations, disrupt growing seasons, raise sea levels, generate storms the likes of which we have never seen, evaporate water supplies, and transform our now benevolent and life-supporting oceans into a toxin-producing mass extinction engine.

In the face of such terrible harms, we as American citizens and as human beings have the responsibility to stand up and do what we can to help people avoid them. To help people make the right choices and to shine a light in the dark places where harms are currently being committed. Deia was within her rights to do just that in documenting a climate action by protesters who voluntarily risked arrest so that the rest of us could, yet again, have the opportunity to make the right choices before it’s too late.

Kevin Jones

There’s a lot of moving parts right now. If climate change policy were strong enough, if we didn’t have such severe climate change denial coming from republicans, then protests like these probably wouldn’t occur. It’s the fact that climate responses have been marginalized and sand bagged for so long that has generated the moral impetus for these kinds of acts of civil disobedience. Paris, the Clean Power Plan, and actions by EPA have all been positive. But the truth of the matter is that there is still very stiff resistance against these programs by entities like TransCanada and there exists a significant possibility that the economic power of the fossil fuel special interests will be enough to overcome these positive programs. Furthermore, it’s pretty clear from the climate perspective that these programs aren’t currently enough. And, in fact, so long as fossil fuel interests hold so much economic and political sway, it is likely that policies that adequately meet the challenge of climate change will not be developed. At least on a broad enough basis to prevent 2 C or greater warming this Century (3 C, 4 C, 5 C…).

The issue is that the fossil fuel interests will always try to extract more. Always try to burn more. Always misinform about how ‘clean’ their products are. It’s been happening ever since this industry started and it will continue to happen so long as they hold sway.

So we’re in this situation of conflict with an industry that holds economic and political power that is far greater than the cigarette companies who generated similar but less far reaching harmful impacts. Greater even than the slave trade whose decline fractured the US. So the challenges we face here are huge. We can enact an energy transition through policies and we can probably mitigate the worst harms of climate change. But if more pipelines are being built, more coal plants being constructed, more gas fields being fracked, more mine being dug, more wells being drilled then we’re heading in the wrong direction. From the standpoint of climate change, existing mines, wells and fossil fuel infrastructure present a very serious problem as-is. But continuing to dig up and burn fossil fuels eventually dumps 20,000 billion tons or more of carbon into the Earth’s atmosphere (if you look at all the possible reserves out there). And the Earth has never seen a carbon spike like that before.

So we have an opportunity with renewables and efficiencies and with a strong global mitigation policy. But that opportunity involves making a choice not to burn the kinds of fuels that are creating the harms we’re starting to see now.

mulga mumblebrain

Yes-fossil fuels are the greatest enemy that it is possible to confront. Like being in a shark-cage, and a white pointer barges in. A punch in the nose might deter it, but possibly not. Resistance, even passive resistance, is going to be confronted with any amount of violence necessary. Whereas in the non-Western world that equates to thousands of environmentalists, peasant activists and others simply being murdered, every year, if they get in the way, in the West, the ludicrous ‘Free World’, that will mean police provocations and infiltrations (as has happened for years in the UK)and savage legal suppression, with ever more Draconian sentences plus solitary confinement and property confiscation, plus suits for damages against individuals brought by the thanatocrats. And if the TPP and TTIP etc get rammed through, the ISDS corporate Star Chambers will open a new path to regression and corporate totalitarianism. I really think that people need to act together and study how to survive the coming repression, and garner enough individual and group spiritual strength to survive the onslaught.

Greg

This tiny little nearly invisible moment pretty much sums it up for me. This is why we hate so many of the rich and powerful who are so pervasively stupefying, nauseatingly, stealing anything and everything they can get their greedy hands on and crushing anyone and anything that gets in their way. Lemonade! Seriously?!

this is a photo of my homey grant with trumps kid at in-n-out & trumps kid is drinking lemonade outta the free water cup… pic.twitter.com/Npuqte5e2b

Spike

Conspiracy charges are also often dragged up against environmental activists in the UK where climate activists and wildlife protectors have been targeted, one case being brought in recent weeks that I’m aware of. There was a notorious case a few years ago, linked below. You have to be very careful what you commit to paper, text or e-mail or say in front of strangers – it has a chilling effect on legitimate protest, which is kind of the point. We can’t let corporate power and their henchmen in government and law enforcement get away with this use of the law for repressive purpose.

Conspiracy is a tough charge to prove. One that often involves a good deal of supposition by the prosecutor. Sure, if you’ve got some kind of communication showing that so and so plotted to do something (like Exxon actively trying to suppress climate change information all while knowing that the science was real) then a conspiracy charge can stick. But these conspiracy charges against climate journalists are pretty much bunk.

Furthermore, law and morality separate when it comes to climate change in numerous cases, especially when you have the North Dakota government providing special protections to harmful industries that present harms to indigenous populations (basically arising from structural racism) and a collapse risk to human civilization. Covering a nonviolent protest against such actions is the very reason we have a freedom of speech amendment in the first place. It provides a check against unjust laws and political/economic associations that are both abusive and deleterious to democracy.

In the US, our revolution was as much against what were, to the colonists, abuses by the East India Trade Company, as it was against dominance by England. The economic interests associated EITC and the crown resulted in a kind of unjust exploitation here on the other side of the pond. And a big part of the issue was a suppression of colonists views on the subject through attempts to control the presses.

If we are going to overcome any problem of exploitation, be it racism or climate change, unadulterated information needs to reach people. People need to see what’s actually happening rather than being fed a comfortable stream of gibberish.

Abel Adamski

We are approaching the Trumpocene, a new epoch where climate change is just a big scary conspiracy

But then you look at the popularity of people like Jones and see that, to increasing numbers of people, they are not people to be ignored, but are paragons of fearless truth-telling.

There’s a demographic to which rhetoric from people like Jones and, more broadly, Trump, appeals.

Jones’s YouTube account has about 1.6 million subscribers and is growing. He has 1.2m likes on his Facebook account. His website, according to SimilarWeb, was getting 27m pageviews a month back in February. Now it’s at 36m.

Earlier this year Jones snagged a rare interview with the conservative blogger Matt Drudge. Jones and Drudge expressed mutual admiration.

Drudge’s news and opinion aggregator website, the Drudge Report, is a genuine web phenomenon and considered hugely influential.

With about 1.37bn page views a month, the Drudge Report is the second-ranked media site in the United States — 600m views behind msn.com but 300m ahead of Google’s news page.

The Drudge Report also tends to link to news items that disparage any action to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

There’s now a whole media ecosystem that climate science denialism can exist inside, where there’s little scrutiny of the views of deniers. US-based sites like the Drudge Report, Infowars, Breitbart and Daily Caller are part of that ecosystem.

Not only is the outlet having influence, but its executive chairman, Stephen Bannon, is running Trump’s campaign.

Breitbart too is growing its audience, according to those SimilarWeb statistics. In February 2016 the site registered 89m page views. In August, it was up to 143m.
Conspiracy central: the activists painting Clinton as a sick, terrorist-friendly killer
Read more

Another characteristic of the Trumpocene might be the heightened levels of hubris combined with triumphant rhetoric and the tendency towards insults.

The Breitbart writer James Delingpole, for example, rejects the evidence of human-caused climate change. Last week he described a Royal Society fellow and climate scientist as a “puffed-up missy”.

“What a bunch of disgraceful, money-grubbing, charlatans the climate alarmists are,” wrote Delingpole, before then trying to link “climate alarmists” with child abusers.

These large followings do not just occur in a vacuum. They are the result of strong advertising and political campaigns aimed at attracting followers. When you’re a source like Brietbart or Drudge or Watts then you’ve got millions and millions of advertising dollars and entire large media agencies at your beck and call. Robots. You name it. Anything to generate the appearance of a bandwagon for people to jump on.

That said, there’s also a degree of increasing marginalization occurring here. As Brietbart and such sources become more mainstream, the extremity of their views becomes more visible. This tends to generate backlash and we can see that in Trump’s very low overall popularity.

The danger is that a constant repetition of false messaging (propaganda) by Brietbart and others results in a hypnotized public. The only counter to this is direct confrontation and shaming of sources like Brietbart. Pandering to these sources is a recipe for disaster.

mulga mumblebrain

Abel, here in Australia we have lived in our own version of the obscurantist Trumpocene for twenty years or so, but we call it the ‘Murdochocene’, after the MSM capo di tutti capi whose rags STILL ferociously deny anthropogenic climate destabilisation, and vilify renewable energy and environmentalists with poisonous intensity.

mulga mumblebrain

Breitbart and the ultra-odious and plainly disturbed and ever abusive Delingpole, are examples of a type we know only too well in Australia. The Murdoch machine, particularly its flag-shit, the ‘Australian'(sickeningly self-described as ‘The Heart of The Nation’)produces exactly that sort of ultra-denialist garbage, day in day out. They even denied the bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef (and the death of the northernmost 25%) by ‘refuting’ the observations of coral reef experts, and one’s eyes, with the opinions of a bird-song expert and climate science amateur (I kid you not), and one rogue scientist. When confronted with this idiocy, they replied with trade-mark viciousness.
Their tactics are growing ever more extreme. Leading climate scientists have vendettas pursued against them. Environmentalists are accused of numerous ‘crimes’, being secret Communists, enemies of the poor (whose welfare the Murdochites never pretend elsewhere to care one jot about)and even ‘antisemites’. What’s more, and while laughable points to deep psychopathological unwellness, the leading apparatchiki even deny their denialism. One former editor, now ubiquitous on the MSM presenting his opinions, declared that not only had the Australian been even-handed, it had, in fact, favoured the side of climate science. This amazing example of cognitive dissonance on steroids was met by the ferocious interviewer with silent acquiescence.
I think that the search for utterly reliable Rightwing authoritarians to populate MSM Empires like Murdoch’s, simply selects for the worst. The type who when faced with a reality that does not bow to their power and intimidatory bullying tactics, simply goes bonkers with rage. When you read the Comments on the web-sites of the denial industry, it is a very chilling experience, indeed.

Greg

Worth noting that methane seeps and potentials for increasing methane seeps due to climate change not only generate a risk of atmospheric release that adds an amplifying feedback to human-forced warming, but of increased ocean anoxia in the seep regions.

Mainstream science’s views on risk of large scale methane seeps spurred by climate change is currently similar to views on rates of glacial destabilization back during the late 80s, 90s, and early 2000s. But as ocean temperatures and heat content rises, these unstable sources are placed under greater and greater heat pressure.

Griffin

A “clean burning fuel”.
You would think maybe that ScienceDaily could not be so impossibly stupid as to tout the “energy resources” of these deposits.
More CO2 means “game over”, no matter how “cleanly” we get it to the atmosphere.
We are long past the time where we need more realistic reporting.

Greg

Sunshine and seawater. That’s all a new, futuristic-looking greenhouse needs to produce 15,000 tonnes of tomatoes per year in the South Australian desert.It’s the first agricultural system of its kind in the world and uses no soil, pesticides, fossil fuels or groundwater. As the demand for fresh water and energy continues to rise, this might be the face of farming in the future….the technology may become useful in the future if climate change causes drought in once-fertile regions, Kristiansen says. “Then it will be good to have back-up plans.”

These are critical resiliency features. We will probably need more of them in the future. Good to see that South Australia is taking sustainability seriously. No fossil fuels or fertilizers in this set-up is a huge achievement. Thank you for posting.

The line keeps going sideways. We had a drop in temp in the 80 North region, but the entire Arctic is still at +4 C above normal. Looking to hit +5.4 C later this week. For fall, those are unprecedented anomalies.

coloradobob

wili –
It’s web, nobody finds anything on their own anymore. It’s a food processor without the lid on it, flinging out tiny chunks of porn, wisdom, the Kardashians, baseball stats, Trump rattling his keys, (and other bright shiny objects), and the great Greek thinkers.
That’s why I have a need to post cave art , those people found something on their own.

Thanks for sharing that, I’m sure that Aristotle was convinced he was living in an age of fools. But he never got to see TMZ.

One can certainly image a time coming soon when EVs serve as electricity storage devices which allows families to resell electricity at a profit and provide revenue by operating autonomously as taxis. Hello new family revenue generation devices. Welcome to real resiliency enablers for the middle class. Everyone should be fighting for this kind of future.

mulga mumblebrain

The hugely over-leveraged system will crash on its own before 2023. Raising interest rates is out of the question, but they still pretend that they will. The current system is unsustainable economically, ecologically and geo-politically. Hell, Purgatory and Limbo are all coming to dine.

June

A climate activist and two documentary filmmakers were arraigned Thursday in Washington state for their roles in last week’s #ShutItDown act of non-violent civil disobedience.

Ken Ward of Oregon, who was arrested for closing a safety valve on Kinder Morgan’s TransMountain tar sands pipeline in Anacortes, Washington, faces charges of burglary, criminal trespass, sabotage, and assemblages of saboteurs.

Ahead of his participation in the “unprecedented” protest, 59-year-old Ward explained why he was taking part: “There is no plan of action, policy, or strategy being advanced now by any political leader or environmental organization playing by the rules that does anything but acquiesce to ruin. Our only hope is to step outside polite conversation and put our bodies in the way. We must shut it down, starting with the most immediate threats—oil sands fuels and coal.”